Just Fine
by Okoriwadsworth
Summary: What did Laurel Lance get up to while Oliver Queen was gone? And how will she react when he comes back?
1. Just Fine

Just Fine.

(Author's Note: Yet another Laurel Lance kicking ass AU. Here, she's been the Black Canary since the Pilot, and Oliver fell right back in love with her soon after. Other than that, everything remains the same. Felicity is on the team as impossibly-cute IT girl and main supplier of Oliver Queen thirst, and Diggle is honorable big brother. Also, Ted Grant in this story is older, sounds like his strep throat has strep throat, and is in no mood for any of this bullshit he's about to be involved with. Enjoy the show.)

(Laurel's POV) She remembered the day she first decided to become a vigilante. It was an unseasonably warm fall day in Starling City, and sunny which was another anachronism. For some reason, it seems like her hometown has always been darker and rainier than any other place that she's been.

She was walking to CNRI for her first day at work, a bag of croissants and coffee in her hand, when she saw it. A young woman, not much older than she was, being hassled by three guys across Largent Road. If that had been all, she would have just been peeved about it but left it alone. Then, the other shoe dropped. A black-and-white, much like the ones her father would have driven when he was a patrolman, drove right by and did nothing. THAT horrified her.

How could these officers of the law, men and women sworn to do the right thing, just stand by and watch them? So, with a mumbled curse that she'd have no time for breakfast now, Dinah Laurel Lance rushed across the street and used every gram of everything she'd ever learned in those self-defense classes to send the three men running. Checking to make sure the young girl was ok; Laurel then rushed back across the street and grabbed her coffee and baked goods. She still did have a job that she couldn't afford to be late to, after all. Except now, she had a new goal burning a hole in her chest. She would save the world, not just with her mind, but with her body.

But before she did anything about it, her naturally cautious personality meant she'd at least bring it up to her father, Detective 1st Grade Quentin Lance. Maybe he knew those officers, and could explain why it was they had passed a textbook assault without so much as a siren. Idly, she thought of that as her code name should things go wrong, but buried it just as quick. This city didn't need another figure of destruction. It needed hope, and love. It needed brightness.

When she went to go to see her dad, though, she didn't find the sober investigative mind she was looking for. Instead, she found someone drunk on bargain-basement gin and bitter with life. He ignored her questions about why the police hadn't helped, spending all of his time on the well-worn notes of complaint that Sara was dead and Oliver Queen had taken her from him. She had heard the song so many times she could play the music blindfolded. That was fine, then. Her father wouldn't help. She'd have to. She'd need to be the justice criminals couldn't run from, or pay off.

And from that day, she decided that she would approach her new goal with the same zeal that she had approached becoming a lawyer. Weekends out turned into moving all of the furniture of her small apartment into her bedroom to practice all the forms of Muay Thai, kickboxing, and Malay stick-fighting that she found on the internet. She signed up for an MMA gym run by this gruff guy named Ted Grant, whose extraordinarily hoarse voice belied a genuine care and aptitude for teaching. Eventually, she found a CrossFit gym called Starlight CrossFit and soon discovered the joys of Olympic weightlifting under a former head coach of the Chinese women's team. All of that, blended together with her own hard-charging nature, made her someone to be cautious of.

She became a heroine, a street-level hero who did all the basic work police didn't seem to know how to. People loved her, and she spent every day making sure that love was never misplaced.

And then her last boyfriend showed up.

Oliver Queen's place in her heart was always more complicated than it ought to have been. For right now, she just couldn't think too hard about it, about HIM. Her city needed to be saved, and to be shown real hope besides.

(Oliver's POV)

Oliver Queen arrived home and could, instantly, feel the difference in his city. Tommy, for one, was noticeably guarded, almost cold in the way he dealt with Oliver. Honestly, that felt a little odd. But he supposed he could subtly look into that later. Right now, he needed to see her.

In those five years, when pain was all he knew, she was the flicker of light that kept him going. When his life was so depressing that he wanted to drive an arrow into his heart and make it all STOP, she was the voice he heard begging him to keep trying, keep standing up. So now that he was back home, he needed to see her. Needed to tell her what she had meant to him, and hope to goodness the sins he had committed before he went on the Queen's Gambit were forgiven.

First things first, though, were his tools. While he had been put through the kind of hell that would cripple most people, Oliver Queen could freely admit that there was one benefit. He had everything, every physical tool, to rebuild the city he had always exploited. If he was going to do this, and he felt he had to, it was some kind of comfort that he would be prepared for it.

Still, though, he couldn't do it. He couldn't do anything, not one solitary thing, until he saw her. Even if she hated him, and that was where he imagined things were going to end up, he at least had to apologize for all of it.

So, he went to the place where Tommy told her Laurel was going to be, even as he said so with more than a bit of scorn in his voice. What had HAPPENED here?

"Hello, Laurel" he said, his voice thicker and needier than he would have liked. Honestly, though, he didn't care. He couldn't be standoffish, or cool. She needed to know he cared, and that he was sorry.

(Laurel's POV)

There he was. After five years of stopping muggers and purse-snatchers, and becoming an enemy of just about every major street gang in Starling City, she found it amusing that this was the thing that gave her pause. She knew, like she knew her own name, everything about the man. Even when everyone told her he was a failure; she knew the truth. The truth he couldn't admit to himself.

Like right now, for instance, she could look at him and tell he regretted everything he ever did to wrong her. But regrets without proof he had changed wasn't going to be enough for something like this. She needed, and quite frankly deserved, more before she thought about anything related to him that wasn't white-hot anger.

And then, he moved to her.

(Oliver's POV)

She was so much different than he remembered. Her smile was still there, her joie de vivre intact. But she looked stronger, both inside and out. He admitted, with joy in him that he thought had died years ago, that she looked healthier than she had when he had left. But then, as he glanced at her with skills he wished he didn't have, he saw it.

Scars and bruises like his own. What had she been doing while he was away? More than that, he wanted to help. Needed to help her.

He'd tell her everything. That was the only way to truly prove he was the man she deserved, even if he didn't think he deserved anything.

"Can I talk to you outside? Please?" he begged, sadness and soul-deep need in his voice. He supposed, absent-mindedly, that the old him would have found this ridiculous. But five years in hell had brought him many things, clarity chief amongst them.

He needed Laurel Lance like most people needed air. Five years away from her had taught him about the man he would be without her presence in his life, and she would need his help if his suspicions about her life were true.

(Laurel's POV)

The Oliver Queen she remembered was never sad, never had that much need in his voice. Need for her, she realized. What had he been through?

Whatever it was, he deserved one last conversation. Whether it would be the final one they had, though, was up to him. If he was still that same big-mouthed party boy who can't think of anything but the next drink and the next girl, he'd be meaningless to her.

But if he was as serious as he seemed right now, he wouldn't be. And the way he was looking at her, like he knew her secrets, might meant she had something she had always needed: A partner.

"Yes, Oliver?" she stated, keeping her hands on her hips and a frown on her face as she tried to remain calm and taciturn.

"I am so sorry, Laurel. I can never, ever, EVER be sorry enough for what I did, or apologize enough for it. I just wanted you to know that before I get out of your life forever" he said, and the calmness she had fought so hard to keep cracked into a million little pieces.

After he said it, though, he left. Almost as if he was terrified she'd hate him.

(Oliver's POV)

He couldn't stand in front of her and watch her hate him. He couldn't do it.

So he walked away, back towards his car and Tommy, and away from her.

And then, just loud enough for him and only him, he heard it.

"I need you" she said.

(Laurel's POV)

As the last consonant of it left her mouth, it was true. She needed him, in ways she couldn't have admitted to herself until she realized she was about to lose him.

"We're not going to make the same mistakes we did before, Ollie. We're going to go slow, and get this right. But we've spent 5 years apart, and no more. Not a second more" she said, standing up to her full height and kissing him lovingly on the lips.

"Good. Canary."

"What?" she said, stuttering nearly. He couldn't have figured it out this quickly. There's just… no way.

"Do you think I couldn't figure it out? All those stories about a woman in the Glades, doing the things YOU would have done. You need a name, and a team. Let me give that to you. Because I need to do it too. I need to help" said Oliver, and she smiled.

6 months later…

The Green Arrow, and the Black Canary, were waiting patiently to go out on patrol. They added new scars, and new team members. But there were questions left to ask.

What happened with Tommy? Why had he become so cold, especially to them? How had that Dark Archer been so easily to handle them both?

But whatever it was, whatever the reason, they were doing the thing they had known they needed to. And they were doing it together. Things were going to be just fine.


	2. Tell Me That You're Alright

Tell Me That You're Alright.

(Author's Note: Discussions of Abuse.)

Detective Quentin Lance knew what people thought of him. If he was being honest, he had managed to cultivate a persona that directly played into that perception. He hemmed and hawed, made himself appear drunker than he ought to be, and generally gave off the notion that his IQ was lower than it actually was.

And it worked, usually. When faced with a person they didn't think was on the ball, or just wanted to get things over with, criminals slipped up. They gave information they wouldn't have, or let slip things they thought he wouldn't notice.

But now? Now, he knew something was going on. His daughter was lying to him. On some things, he didn't mind. He noticed she had put on more muscle and gotten leaner. But that didn't bother him. Lord knows he had let himself go seriously. And honestly, if that was all it had been, he might have even asked her for the workout regimen she had picked up.

But he saw scars and bruises on her. More so, broken bones. She had splinted fingers, a broken hand, and more black and blue marks than she knew what to do with. That couldn't be normal.

And so, even though he knew how much he hated bringing being a detective home with him, he couldn't help himself. He analyzed everything that had changed in her life over the past few months. Then, with a chill in his blood, he figured out the difference.

Oliver Queen had returned. He had NEVER, not once, liked that spoiled little brat. And it only got worse when he returned from that island that was probably a little vacation where he just lifted weights and drank coconut water while his daughter lay dead at the bottom of the ocean.

So, even though he hoped he was wrong, Quentin Lance drove over to where he knew Laurel lived to ask her if she was ok. He had spent a lifetime learning how to read people, to see something they couldn't admit to themselves.

He didn't want to believe it could POSSIBLY be true, but if it was, he knew he'd have to save his daughter from herself.

_**Meanwhile, at Oliver Queen's Penthouse….**_

Laurel Lance noticed, not for the first time, the differences between her old life and this one. Sure, she still had all of her law books. Those weren't going anywhere, after all. Working for CNRI meant she knew a lot about the worst of the worst. It gave her an intelligence source she needed if she was going to be the heroic figure Oliver saw her as. Besides, she loved the feeling of standing in a courtroom and watching someone realize that she had pulled their well-laid plans apart one thread at a time. She didn't honestly ever want to give that up.

But there were new books, new tomes of learning, that drew her attention equally. She had discovered multiple books on every form of martial arts that existed. Honestly, it was almost like cheating. She had spent so long training her mind to retain information about terribly complicated legal statutes that what she learned on her off time for her "night job" was easy. So, she thought to herself, during the day she'd make sure people felt strength in the law. And at night, she'd pick up justice where the law couldn't reach.

And that brought her to Oliver Queen. It sometimes felt like she had been drawn to him by some force beyond her understanding. But whatever it was, she was happy they were together. She felt like the best version of herself that she could be around him, and it was also nice to know that she was around someone who _**GOT IT**_.

Oliver knew what it was like to patrol the city at night, to know the difference between some scared kid looking to steal enough money for a warm meal and a career criminal who reveled in fear. He got what it meant to want to save people, to walk a scared child through a rough neighborhood or show an awestruck teenager that being tough meant also being kind.

Lord knows her father didn't want to even try. Ever since Oliver had gotten on that boat, Quentin had died too. The man of superlative honor she had believed him to be was gone. In its place was someone bitter, broken, and drunk. She hoped, with whatever heart she could, that he would remember who he was. Because right now, at this moment, she couldn't.

So, as she prepped her gym bag for her evening session at Starlight CrossFit with her coach Min Jiang as they got her both stronger and more agile, she opened the door and saw her dad standing in the doorway looking at her with shame in his eyes. But not, as she figured, shame at her. At least not completely.

"Laurel, baby, are you heading out in the next little while?" he begged, looking smaller and sadder than she could ever remember him being. Something had happened, she was sure of it. And whatever it was, he had remembered enough of their old connection to be interested in reconnecting.

"Of course, daddy. I always have time for you. What's the problem?" Laurel said, her heart beginning to sink as her mind instantly whirred through every dark possibility.

"I've been very good to not complain about Oliver Queen. I know he's come back, but I've NEVER liked him. Not once, and whatever he's been doing to you is the reason why" Quentin said, anger burning in his voice at the mere mention of that little shit's name.

"WHAT? Do you think he's hitting me, dad?" Laurel fumed, and at that exact moment, the nitroglycerine this fire really didn't need entered the room.

(Oliver's POV)

Oliver Jonas Queen understood fear. He had lived underneath its oppressive boot for 5 years on the island. He knew what it could do.

And, now that he was back in his old life, he was planning to use all he could remember about fear to inflict it only on those who deserved it. Those who used their money to abuse people, to make them bear a weight no one should be expected to carry, deserved his full attention. But the hard-working people of Starling City? He would never be the thing they feared. He wanted to be the person they went to, both in his daytime life and his nighttime one.

So, as he walked back into his penthouse with all the ingredients for sesame noodles and chicken curry, he was smiling. The love of his life, the one person whose presence ensured he didn't lose all the light he had left, was waiting for him. Sure, she had to go to work out soon but he could spend time with her and make sure she had a high-quality dinner when she got home.

But as he opened the door, he heard a sound he had been the cause of before. Laurel yelling and sobbing in equal measure.

(Laurel's POV)

HOW COULD HE? Her father couldn't possibly think Oliver had been abusive. Even at his flighty and arrogant worst, he had never hit her.

Logically, in a voice that was being drowned out by the thunderstorm of anger in her head, she knew where this was coming from. She had broken her hand punching someone, and if you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd imagine it was something an abusive boyfriend might do. Funny thing, though. That broken hand was punching out an abusive boyfriend who the cops couldn't get put behind bars.

"DAD! Oliver has never laid an angry hand on me, before that island or after. And especially after" Laurel says, her eyes welling up with tears as she sees Oliver Queen standing shocked and saddened in her doorway. In that moment, in exactly that moment, she knows what she needs to do.

"Oliver Queen is the only man I can ever love. EVER. If I ever want children, he would be an excellent father. I know him in my soul, in my bones, and that man is perfect for me. Has been since the first day I met him when we were 8 years old. I don't know what more he needs to do to show you that he's the man I've always known him to be. But he is, and it's why I love him" said Laurel, her eyes stinging with tears as she realized she had never told Oliver any of this until right now.

Worse still, she realized with an ache in her heart that was stronger than any broken bone, there was the real possibility that no one had told him any of this for far too long.

(Quentin's POV)

Wait. He was wrong? Oliver Queen never hit her? Then how…. OH SHIT.

"You're the Black Canary aren't you? And he's the Green Arrow?"

(Laurel and Oliver's POV)

OH SHIT. He figured it out. They supposed he was going to before they told anyone. But what was he going to do now? Was he going to bring them in, put them in jail?

That was their darkest fear. Even in their rookie year as a partnership, they had made more enemies than they knew what to do with. Rich people, even behind the bars of federal prisons, had influence and could use it like a sledgehammer.

(Quentin's POV)

There was only one thing to do. Honestly, only one thing was right.

He made a phone call.

"Frank? Yeah, it's Quentin. Bring me all the paperwork over for a confidential informant. Yeah, highest secrecy" he said, a thin smile on his face as he did not enjoy doing this but knew he had to.

"Now look, the two of you are confidential informants. Highest security. The supreme court of the state can't make you reveal your identity. Now, this means that when you find out something, you bring it to me. Just me. Do we have an agreement?"

(Oliver and Laurel's POV)

Well, yes they did. Keep the cops off of their back in exchange for leaving criminals tied up and waiting for the police? That could work.

They shook hands on it, and that was good enough. And with that, Quentin left.

"I don't need to know EVERYTHING you do. Just, if you need some help, let me know."

So, with that taken care of, they had another problem.

"This Dark Archer. He kicked my ass, and he kicked your ass, like it was no problem. We have to figure out who it is, and we have to stop whatever his plans are. Because if we can't, if we can't save our city from a monster like that, what are we doing?" said Laurel, desperation in her voice.

"We'll figure it out, Pretty Bird. We always do" said Oliver, hope in his voice as much to make sure that the love of his life never loses her faith in their partnership as anything else.

"But, Ollie, we can't do this alone. We need help" says Laurel, her momentary crisis of confidence having reformulated into needing something to DO.

And so, as night fell on Starling City, the Green Arrow and the Black Canary planned. They strategized. And they got ready.

_**Meanwhile, at Malcolm Merlyn's Mansion…..**_

Darkness crept in, under the floorboards and into every nook, cranny, and crevice. It had been here since Rebecca Merlyn had died, and those who knew the family before and after argued that it never truly left.

And right now, in the drawing room, the two people who had been the most warped by that darkness talked about their days over cognac.

"Do you think they have any idea of what's happening to them?" said Tommy Merlyn, his blue eyes cold and foreboding.

"Not a hint of it. And if they do ever figure it out, if they do ever put it all together, watching their heartbreak and betrayal will be worth it" said Sara Lance, relaxing with panther-like grace in her sitting chair.

Yes, the darkness was here and it was never leaving.


	3. The Darkness Enters

The Darkness Enters.

(Author's note: If you ever wondered how Evil!Sara happened in Chapter 2 of Just Fine, this is how. If you're a Sara Lance fan, this is not the chapter for you. I will be taking everything they positively portray on Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow for that matter, and making it a negative. If you don't think like that's something you want to read, I understand. Please enjoy our feature presentation.)

Ever since puberty hit, Sara Marie Lance had been a headache for her father, Detective 1st Grade Quentin Lance, and her mother, Dinah Drake-Lance. For starters, her choice in romantic partners tended to be the sort of people that Quentin had either arrested, or was about to. Add to that her seeming allergy to wearing the actual uniform of Balliol Prep, at least without severe modifications, and it seemed like every other week they were getting called somewhere for something.

But if her parents were annoyed by her, and how she thought, her older sister Laurel was absolutely infuriated with her. Because, after her last attempt at a serious romantic relationship ended up with her partner getting arrested for drug possession of all things, she had made the decision to go after her boyfriend Oliver Queen. And worse than that, she hadn't been exactly subtle about her choice.

Sara knew the effect she had on men, and women, for that matter. It didn't take too much for her to be able to use her beauty to get what she wanted when she didn't feel like working for it. She had new clothes she hadn't paid for, grades she hadn't earned, and social status all because she knew how to use her charms to their maximum benefit. In short, she was used to getting what she wanted. And what she wanted, what she craved, was to be as close as she could be to the money and influence that the heir to the Queen Consolidated fortune would undoubtedly have. In that spirit, she began to wear shorter skirts and tighter pants around Oliver and waited to see the same thing that she had always seen in everyone's eyes: lust. But, and this infuriated her, she never saw it. And when she didn't see it, a little voice in the back of her head told her that it was time to steal him away. Show him what he was missing, and be direct.

So, if she couldn't make Oliver want her, she'd take him. So, when Oliver went on his boat trip with his father to learn how to be a better businessman, she snuck on the boat. It was easy enough, honestly. A quick little blowjob to an utterly stunned harbor master got her on the boat, and then it was a matter of hiding.

But again, Oliver Queen rejected her. He told her that he was flattered by her obvious interest in him, but he would only truly ever have eyes for Laurel. In fact, he was kind about it. He vowed that he would never mention this to her older sister, or to her family. As far as Oliver Queen was concerned, this was a schoolgirl crush and that's all it would ever be.

And then, the Queen's Gambit sunk with Sara Lance flying through an open hole in the hull. Swimming desperately, trying to find an escape, she never heard Oliver screaming for her. As she survived, the rage she felt at being rejected from his bed metastasized. It became all-consuming, a black pit that demanded to be fed. So when she found her way onto a ship called the Asiatic Pearl, she was willing to do anything to destroy Oliver Queen. And the woman on the boat was bewitching, clearly Asian, and offered to help her become the monster Oliver deserved to fear. Her name? Talia Al Ghul. It didn't matter what she learned how to do, or how much it hurt. She wanted to destroy Oliver Queen, utterly and completely, and if her sister fell alongside him, that was just the cost of doing business. So, for 4 years, she trained herself to become an assassin, a bringer of vengeance and bloodshed.

And when she returned home, she found a kindred spirit. Another who had surrendered to the darkness in him, and had been driven there by Oliver Queen and Laurel Lance.

_**Back in Starling City….**_

Tommy Merlyn was a playboy, a skirt-chaser, and whatever other names you want to use to describe someone who lived the way he did. But he could admit, of all of his conquests, there was one that had eluded him. Sure, it required more work but he was Thomas Merlyn, heir to the Merlyn Global nest-egg. He could make any woman interested in him with enough charm, or with more than a few pharmaceutical inducements to make the work a little bit easier. And the woman he had his eye on, the woman he wanted and thought he deserved?

It was Dinah Laurel Lance, the love of his best friend's life, and for all he knew, his best friend was dead. No reason why they shouldn't both move on, and why she shouldn't be in his arms. But she wouldn't.

For reasons he admitted freely to never understanding, she was still holding a torch for Oliver. Sure, that torch was tinged with more than its fair share of anger but she didn't want to move on until she and Oliver settled up. And right now, in this moment, there was no way that could actually happen. So, and this infuriated Tommy more than he could actually put into words, she just…. Stopped hanging around all of them. McKenna had become a cop, and Tommy was working at Merlyn Global just like his dad had wanted, but they used to hang around all the time.

What Tommy didn't understand was that Laurel knew how badly Tommy wanted her, and felt increasingly uncomfortable being alone with him. But he couldn't see that, blinded as he was with greed over not getting the girl he wanted. One day, he mentioned to his father, Malcolm, about how poorly he was dealing with anger and he smiled at the gleam in his dad's eye.

That night, Tommy and Malcolm Merlyn took one of their private jets and flew to a small town in the Tibetan valley. And then they found Sara Lance being trained by Talia Al Ghul, and it was like the darkness that they had inside fed on the others. For 5 years, they trained and trained in silence. They made vows. They fell in love, a dark and twisted love built by hatred of their former friends and family.

And then, one day while they were in town getting supplies, they got texts from Malcolm explaining that Oliver was alive. The plan would begin, now. They'd break Oliver and Laurel, and they'd never see it coming.


	4. Suffering And What Comes After

(Author's Note: Thank you to the Lauriver Discord server for helping me work through some of the issues with this story. Namely, the dates everything is happening on. When we first see Oliver Queen in this chapter, it's January 3rd, 2011. He returned in 2010. So, when you get to the big shift in this story, it's the beginning of 2011.)

_**In A Conference Room of Queen Consolidated….**_

(Oliver Queen's POV)

Oliver Queen strode into the offices of his family's multi-faceted global conglomerate feeling pretty close to the best version of himself that he had in a while, with his trusted bodyguard John Diggle by his side. Ever since he had gotten back with Laurel and they had decided to fight crime together in the night and be exemplars of what the city could be in the daytime, he had begun to feel a connection between the two sides of himself that he had long imagined to be severed by everything he had gone through on Lian Yu.

There were things still nagging at him, of course, and he supposed that would never end. It was the life of a hero, and a peace officer, to realize that there would always be threads of some case you hadn't been able to pull apart yet.

But he couldn't stop thinking about something one of his informants had told him the night before. Creating a network of people who could keep their nose to the ground, listening for information in places both Oliver Queen and the Green Arrow could never be found without creating more suspicion than he wanted, had been Laurel's idea. She had always been determined to make sure that everyone who interacted with them both knew their desire to see justice done, and that they were only picking up when the law hit its limits.

But last night, one of his informants had told him that there was a new archer hitting people underneath the police's radar. While the notion that the SCPD could have missed something was not an unexpected occurrence, the idea that there was someone else wandering around his city looking to hurt people with the same weapons he used was a real worry.

As a result of that, his mind wasn't completely on the meeting his kindly receptionist told him he had. Ms. Carol seemed to have been born with the kind of old-world southern gentility you simply didn't find anymore. On her desk was a candy jar with peppermints and other small candies. Distracted as he was, Oliver never noticed that Tommy Merlyn was standing in the middle of the conference room with a backpack on. What should have really tipped him off, though, was the way Tommy was standing. Not smiling warmly, with his eyes light and full of warmth like they had been before Lian Yu, but cool and measuring. Honestly, like he hated what he was seeing and was going to do something about it.

"Do you ever think about the island? I mean, really think about what happened to you there, Oliver?" Tommy asked, slowly dragging the Green Arrow out of his fugue state as John slowly began to twig to the notion that something was not quite right, and cursed to himself that he hadn't been diligent enough in his duties to search Tommy Merlyn.

"No, Tommy. I honestly try not to. What I suffered through, there, is not something I look forward to reliving or forcing anyone else to hear about. It's a part of me, to be sure, but there are many things more important to me than whatever happened to me that night. Why are you asking?" Oliver said, slowly starting to feel THAT trickle down his spine and into his fingers. It was the one he felt the first time he had been put in a position where he had to kill a man, and the same one he had when he joined Laurel on the raid of Adam Hunt's building. It was a deeply unwelcome feeling, and one he never expected to feel coming from someone who had once been one of his closest friends.

"Because, Oliver, it's your fault your father is dead" said Tommy, quickly turning Oliver around only to see his best friend with a compound bow with an arrow already nocked. "It's your fault Laurel doesn't love me like she's supposed to, because it's always been you and her since the beginning. And it's your fault that you're about to die." And at that moment, he fires the bow and a stunned Oliver only has a moment before an arrow lands in his stomach and he falls through the glass window of the conference room into the hallway leading into his office. Crawling desperately towards his office, as Ms. Carol looks on in horror, Oliver desperately tries to figure out some way to fight back only to see Tommy glance to his left and fire another arrow right through his receptionist's throat.

"Crawl, Oliver. Crawl like the child you are. Be the selfish boy you've always been, instead of admitting your responsibility for all of this" growled Tommy, before knocking him across the face with the butt of his bow. "I'm not going to kill you, Oliver, because you don't value your life. I'm not even going to take your company, because you've proven you don't really want that. What I am going to do, though, is take from you the things you do value. Thea, Laurel, your reputation and your home. Everything you love, everything that is important to you, I will destroy."

Slumping against his desk, Oliver slowly begins to crawl to his phone to make a call. But as the blood-loss and fatigue take control, and John moves in around him, he simply says one word over and over again until he loses consciousness: "Laurel"

_**Meanwhile, at CNRI….**_

(Laurel Lance's POV)

She was having a flashback. That was the only explanation that made sense.

Because if she wasn't, if somehow Channel 52 was running another story about how Oliver Queen was missing and presumed dead, she could feel her heart literally shatter in pieces.

But as she thought that, the door opened and she was sure now that she had been hit on the head by one of the villains she had been chasing with Oliver. Because walking through the door, or perhaps more accurately strutting, was her sister Sara Lance. And by gods, what had HAPPENED to her?

The Sara she remembered was boy-crazy, sure, but she was still fundamentally kind under it all. This Sara, on the other hand? She radiated evil and lustful arrogance. She knew everyone's eyes was on her, and she reveled in it. Also, the way she was dressed distinctly indicated that Sara had found every hedonistic pleasure that existed in the world, and overdosed on them all at the same time. Her baby sister, the same one who loved ice cream and watching cartoons, was now sauntering into a lawyer's office in a black leather catsuit showing all of her charms to anyone who had any particular interest in looking. To her great dismay, Laurel realized, **EVERYONE** was looking.

Walking to her sister's office and closing the door so no one could see what would happen next, swaying her hips cartoonishly, Sara leans on her desk and begins to taunt her sister.

"Has that ever happened to you? Of course, it hasn't, Laurel. To all these people in your office, you're their cute big sister. The one they want to impress, to model themselves after. But me? I never needed or wanted any of that role model bullshit. I wanted to be sexy, the way you could NEVER be. You needed to know you could be smart, be a lawyer and make a difference. All I needed to know was that this body, the way I can use it, could get me anything I wanted. And right now, I want to humiliate you. I want to ruin your life. I want to make everything you've built seem fragile and useless. I've already done it just by walking in here. After I leave, everyone in this office will wonder why I'm so much prettier than the woman they thought was a queen. But they won't be thinking of that too much. They'll be too busy picking your unconscious ass up off the floor. You see, Laurel, my man is a real man. And he's already broken yours."

Blinking back tears, Laurel walks Sara outside to an alley because her dignity refuses to let her cry in front of her colleagues. As soon as she gets outside and almost too fast to see, Sara fires a low kick to the kneecap that buckles the Black Canary's leg just enough that the next one tears the MCL and patella tendon in her left leg. Grabbing her sister by the hair Sara slams Laurel head-first into a dumpster, knocking her out cold.

"Bye, sis. You'll love what we do with the place."

_**Later on, at Krieg Memorial Hospital….**_

(Felicity Smoak's POV)

On days like this, she wished she had never got involved with this crusade of the Green Arrow and the Black Canary. It was a deeply stressful life that she had gotten herself involved in, after all, and alongside John Diggle it meant that they had ended up learning about all manner of things they both wished that they didn't know about. But and this she admitted to herself every time she began to have doubts, she remembered what living in Starling City before the Green Arrow and the Black Canary had shown up was like.

She had spent more money on Uber's and Lyft's than she would have liked, just to avoid being attacked by whatever band of roving reprobates were between her and home. And then, the Black Canary and Green Arrow showed up and that worry faded. For all of their skills, for everything they could do, the best part of them was that they would always try to do good. Even when it was a bad idea, even when doing so would be dangerous and foolhardy, they still always tried.

And now, to see them both in adjoining hospital beds with some of the best doctors in the world working double-time to patch them up, she was reminded of how that iron will could bend when met with superior skill. Lord knows, she knew her limitations. She wasn't ever going to walk out there and fight like Laurel could, but there had not been a computer system in the world she couldn't crack.

But as Master Sergeant John Diggle walked back into the waiting room, bringing them lemonades as they waited, she knew that there was no possible way that she could live with herself if she let Starling City fall right back into the grip of madmen and criminals like it had been before her new home's city had protectors to look out for it. What that meant for her, she realized, was complicated.

She'd have to be the "woman in the chair" for someone. The only question in her mind, and it was a big shining bright one, was who that was going to be for.

(Oliver Queen's POV)

God damn everything hurt. And when he woke up, Oliver saw something that made him hurt even worse than what he knew were stomach wounds from Tommy Merlyn's arrow. In the bed next to him, battered and swollen, was Dinah Laurel Lance. The notion that he had been beaten by his best friend didn't bother him nearly as much as the idea that he hadn't been there to save Laurel from what looked like a broken nose, and pretty serious leg injuries.

But and this hurt him more than he could even say out loud, he had to admit Tommy was right. He had been responsible for everything that had happened to him. If he hadn't been so distracted, thinking about what he knew now was Tommy Merlyn's way to sneak in under his nose, he might have been able to be there for Laurel, and for Thea. The notion that he couldn't be now, that she was suffering and Thea had been sent away to Central City because of decisions he had made, was a pain that was even worse than the surgical stitches in his gut. Rather than just dwell in his guilt and sorrow over what had happened to them both earlier today, he'd do something about this. In this moment, he realized, they needed to get better. He needed to improve his situational awareness and his draw speed with a bow, and have more martial arts training so that he could defend himself should his bow be unavailable. He didn't quite know what Laurel needed, but he'd make sure she had it. He had almost broken her heart once before, and would rather die before doing it again.

He was not one of those people who saw improvement in skill as a sign of surrender. Rather, he realized that they needed to get better, to never stop looking for those who could help them in their mission. It wouldn't be an insult to what his father demanded of him if he expanded his skills. It'd be a tribute.

(Laurel Lance's POV)

She couldn't move her leg. That was the first thing she noticed when she woke up. For a brief moment, she couldn't remember how it happened. Then, it hit her. She had been humiliated in her own office, in front of people she called friends and colleagues, by her own baby sister. She had been powerless to stop her. And then, if that wasn't enough, she had been beaten up in an alleyway like some nobody and left for dead. If not for people coming out after they heard a noise, who knows what could have happened?

Laurel had been training for a while now under Ted Grant, so she thought she knew as much as she needed to defend her city from those who would do her harm. And up until her baby sister attacked her with speed she was sure no one could possess; she was probably correct in that assessment. But as she was beginning to come to grips with now, Ted Grant had done all he could do. In order to be the hero, the lady of justice her city deserved, she needed to be more. And somewhere out there, there was someone who could help her do that. But as she continued to think, she began to come to the conclusion that Sara was right in what she had said. Not the part about Oliver not being a real man, because that was ridiculous.

No one looked at her and saw sex appeal. She didn't want to be objectified, sure, but she wanted to at least feel like she was desirable. Instead, she was treated like a work of fine art. Someone you loved, but didn't try and touch out of fear of "defiling" them in some way. She hated that. And, as she looked up at the dingy roof tiles in Krieg Memorial Hospital, she realized Oliver treated her that way too. He was so terrified of losing her again that he wouldn't ever do anything, say anything, to make her regret the decision. After everything he had suffered through, there was a part of her that got that.

She wasn't about to get to a place where she was walking around with everything she had on display. But she needed to find a happy medium between whatever she was now, and what she wanted to be. The only thing she was stuck on was this: What did she actually **want** to be?

_**5 days later….**_

(Laurel Lance's POV)

Oliver Queen, for all of his general desire to be thought of as a "man of the people", still could trade on his wealth, power, and influence when he needed to. So, as she limped her way onto a Queen Consolidated private plane, ostensibly headed to China to help Laurel rehab her leg injury using bleeding-edge bio-medical technology, she figured it was past time to have some truly uncomfortable conversations.

"Why are we going to Beijing, Ollie? What's there for us that we can't find in Starling City?" she asked, sort of leading the witness as she kept her casted leg up and snacked on butter toffee peanuts.

"I wasn't always on Lian Yu, pretty bird. For the last 3 years of my time away, I did things I'm not proud of to keep you and Thea safe. There's not a lot of stuff I won't tell you, but why I got myself into this situation is one of those things where I can't say a word. But when I was off of Lian Yu, I saved a woman's life. It turns out she is not just an assassin of the first order, but perhaps the most talented hand-to-hand fighter I have ever seen. Pick a martial art, darling, and she excels in it. And because I saved her life, she owed me a debt. I could not cash it in at the time, and told her so, and she was very clear that when the time came that I could she would do whatever I asked. We have now reached that time. I asked her to train the both of us how to fight without weapons of any sort, and to find whatever teachers she thought appropriate for other skills we both needed" Oliver said, and Laurel could see the logic and the beauty in the plan.

If they were going to be the heroes, they knew their city demanded, the ones who could bring justice where traditional systems of it could not work, this work demanded that they be the best they could be. If Oliver was going to be an archer, and deliver justice to his city one arrow at a time, the work he was doing demanded his very best. And she knew, as much as she knew her own name, she had to get herself to something approximating the level of skill this mysterious woman she was being sent to train under.

But, as she looked down to her casted leg, she knew the other thing she wanted to do. And while the notion of her sneaking around to do it held some appeal, she knew she had to talk to him about it. Besides, as she realized with some bittersweet amusement, she realized she didn't know all that much about the type of woman he liked. She knew he'd say her, just the way she was, and she knew he would mean it. But she needed to feel like an adult, a full-grown woman, and knowing exactly how to drive her man wild just by the sight of her was always good.

"Oliver, there's another thing. My sister's alive, and she was the one who broke my leg. And she said some things to me that I didn't realize were true, and the way people look at me is one of them. The way **YOU** look at me is one of them. You look at me like something fragile and delicate, and before what Sara did to me, I didn't notice it. But now, things are starting to become clear. I want to grow old with you, Ollie, and have your children. But I can't possibly do that if our relationship is stuck in this weird holding pattern it's been for 5 years. I'm twenty-six years old, Ollie. I'm not in my early 20's. And neither are you. If we're going to have the romance both of us deserve, we have to have actual romance" Laurel said, nerves overtaking her as she prayed to every god she could think of that she didn't blow it.

"I understand. And you're right, pretty bird. I have been treating you like a delicate flower. But I never knew you wanted anything else. I wanted the good girl, the one who wouldn't need or be interested in the party lifestyle. But if you want to be something else, something more, I will follow and support you all through whatever you need to do in order to become the person you want to become. I promise. I love you, and I will never stop loving you" Oliver said, holding his love's hand and desperately trying to tell her how much he loves her without uttering any more words.

So, as their plane landed at Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, Laurel made herself a promise. She would do everything possible to be the woman she could become, and to be someone who could fight alongside the Green Arrow.

_**At a Buddhist monastery in Hangzhou…**_

(Lady Shiva's POV)

While she was not afraid of death, focused as she was on becoming the absolute best unarmed martial artist in the world, this did not mean she looked forward to having it happen before she made sure that her goal was achieved. In that spirit, she remembered the man who saved her from certain death. There was a warrior's spirit in someone who she had learned was almost incomprehensibly rich, and to be honest, she wasn't quite sure how to think about him as a result. But despite that, he had a debt with her for saving his life and she was going to pay that back. And then, he did something truly selfless. He contacted her, and explained that the love of his life required training and skills. She remembered seeing photos of her during their brief conversation, and now knowing she wanted to follow him into this new life made her have more respect for him than normal.

So, when they arrived, she knew their work would begin. But she was not an archer, believing that anything you could not do with your own fists and your own will was not something worth doing. So, in this moment, she made a phone call to an archer of the highest quality. After all, Oliver had asked for them BOTH to be trained and she was going to be the kind of person who paid all of her debts. As she read the note further, and understood what Mr. Queen wanted her to do, she smiled. If he wanted to have the skills to match his heart, she would make sure he did.

(Laurel Lance's POV)

Even though she was clearly in a tremendously beautiful section of the Chinese countryside, it was still abundantly clear that she was walking into a place where she had to be on high guard. This was, in every way that could exist, a place where warriors lived. It leeched out from the stone columns, poured down the steps, and fed in the fountains and lakes on the property. The martial spirit here was powerful, and she knew she needed to feed off of that. If she was to be reborn, to be the person she wanted to turn into, this was the best place to do it. Scratch that, the ONLY place that she could do it.

And yet, as she glanced down at the enormous knee brace hiding the injuries her baby sister had given her, part of her mind went back to her home in Starling City. How were things there? Who was picking up where they had left off?

_**Meanwhile, back in Starling City….**_

(John Diggle's POV)

For all of his life, John Diggle had been a soldier. The concept of the burden of command had always been something he noticed, but relished not having. He thought of himself as a quartermaster when he was working with Oliver Queen, someone who kept the place full of all the little things no one realized they needed until the heartbreaking day people realized they were out of arrows, or skin glue, or staples.

But now, as he became the Green Arrow and realized all the stuff Oliver just did to keep this mission running, John could freely admit he never understood just how hard this would be. For one, he didn't realize just how utterly exhausting being fitted for a suit of the type Oliver wore would actually be. It took Felicity 10 tries to make him something that didn't instantly feel like he was prancing about Starling City in tights. Besides, this one was a truly brilliant green that could be seen from the top row of National Stadium.

And then, it was the archery. John had long ago decided he was never going to be as good a shot as Oliver was with a bow. Few people in the world could say they were. So, when given a choice to go out with a bow and have people suddenly wonder why the Green Arrow had become a worse shot or do something else instead, he chose to do something else. Felicity made him a crossbow called the Green Monster and off he went, keeping a compound bow on him just in case because he had discovered the degree of difficulty for that went down drastically.

But while John had figured out, by studying surveillance footage and doing interviews, that Sara Lance and Tommy Merlyn were behind the attacks on his friend he thought it weird that he hadn't heard neither hide nor hair of them since. That was weird, he realized. But then, with horror in his heart, he realized why. To them, they had won. They had sent Oliver and Laurel away. He should probably look in on CNRI, and hope to god that Sara hadn't been serious when she told Laurel that "she would love what they did with the place".

And then, on one of the police and fire scanners that had been repurposed for exactly this thing, John Diggle and Felicity Smoak heard that CNRI, the place Laurel worked at and saw as a sanctuary from her nighttime job, was burning to the ground. Instinctively, they wanted to go and help. But just as quickly, they remembered it would do no real good. What, exactly, could the Green Arrow do against a fire except create more questions about who started it?

So, they'd stand back and they'd mourn. And when Laurel and Oliver returned, they'd tell them what happened. Because what happened here, what they had just heard, was not just arson. They saw it for what it was, what they knew it was intended to be seen as for anyone with any knowledge of tactics. The burning of CNRI was a declaration of war.

(Detective 1st Grade Quentin Lance's POV)

It was odd, Quentin thought as he did paperwork, that the Green Arrow and the Black Canary weren't around anymore. Sure, he knew that Oliver and Laurel were those people but it still felt odd to know that they were "on vacation". He wasn't even sure if that odd was good, or bad. Sure, he liked knowing that actual police, people who had worked from being cadets at the academy into actual officers, were out there doing 85% of what two vigilantes could do. But even he had to admit, loath as he was to voice it out loud in the precinct, that there were some things even plainclothes officers could not do, and places they could not go. Part of the trouble you have with being in Starling City is that everyone who works for the SCPD sort of has a police feel about them. Even the department's most skilled undercover officers had inevitably found themselves blocked from the most…. "interesting" cases. (The rumors about Chief Nudocerdo being on the take, and thus preventing the true depths of the city's crime problem from ever being accurately explored, was not something he wanted to think about for too long.)

The Green Arrow and the Black Canary, on the other hand, could easily find information and create sources he could only dream of. While he knew his department could keep street crime at a minimum, he wanted them back for the bigger stuff. Because there was something that had moved past gnawing at him, and into eating at his brain while he tried to sleep. The people who had driven the city's heroes away had taken an almost perverse glee in hiding from any attempts to be found, to be discovered. What was he missing?

(Sara Lance and Tommy Merlyn's POV)

As they got on a private jet and returned to their training camp in the Indonesian forests, Sara Lance and Tommy Merlyn smiled evilly at each other as they held hands. They had done their job. Oliver and Laurel had voluntarily taken themselves off the board and out of the game. Sure, someone else had picked up the hood but they didn't much care about that. All that mattered to them was that the two people they hated the most were gone. Where they went, they didn't care. From what they knew of their former friends, they'd be back someday. And when they did return, they'd destroy them for good.

_**Back in Hangzhou….**_

(Oliver Queen's POV)

As he and Laurel were walked into the main fighting hall to see where their skills were at before Lady Shiva chose how their training would commence, Oliver took a moment to exhale and whistle in awe at what he was seeing. In his 5 years away, he had heard about places like this.

For a brief moment, he wondered if Tatsu had found her way to something similar. Honestly, though, he wished she didn't. After what she had suffered through, what he had helped to make her suffer through, all he wanted for her was the chance to live a normal life.

Standing there in the middle of the fighting hall, he saw Lady Shiva walking towards him and noticed that she was glancing at the carbon-fiber compound bow that he never took off. Instantly, he saw it. If he was going to train to be a better fighter alongside Laurel, he could not have his bow as a failsafe. Sure, he felt naked without having a bow and a quiver of arrows but that was ok. Laurel needed to learn, and so did he.

(Lady Shiva's POV)

The bravery of this Laurel Lance was truly something to behold. To walk in here was impressive enough by itself, but to do it on crutches with a knee brace on just to learn whatever she could was something that struck her as being above and beyond what so many of her students had done. The last person who had done something like this was the Bat, and he had only shown up when his back had been broken and he needed to be re-educated.

This was a whole different thing. This was someone who did not even move like a fighter moved, and was simply here to learn out of a desire to do good. Lady Shiva could never understand that desire, but she respected those who had it. And so, as she watched Laurel stand in a frankly abominable fighting stance made somewhat forgivable by the fact she was still cautious about her knee, Lady Shiva made her presence felt with a perfect backflip before standing directly in front of an awe-struck Laurel Lance.

(Laurel Lance's POV)

OH MY GOD. As Laurel Lance watched this diminutive woman flip through the air and land right in front of her, all she could think of was that she wanted to be able to do that. And then she realized that she could ASK for what she wanted. All of her life, she had just thought about it and hoped that her body language or ESP would somehow make people give her what she wanted. But here, with nothing but time to learn and no one to judge her, she decided that if she was going to change, now would be a time.

"That. I want to be able to flip just like that. Can you teach me how to do that?" Laurel said, and Lady Shiva smiled.

"When your leg heals, I will teach you all I know. For now, we will begin with what you can do. Hit me."

Handing Oliver her crutches Laurel attempts to hit Lady Shiva and finds the task nigh impossible, as Shiva simply feints, dodges, and dips before landing a backfist to the jaw and then a flurry of flash kicks to the face that are thrown faster than most people can walk. Dropping like a stone, holding a split lip and idly realizing she has a black eye, Laurel accepts the hand up from Lady Shiva.

"When you can do that, EXACTLY that, I will teach you how to fly, Canary."

Despite her split lip and black eye, Laurel smiled and the joy in her green eyes was evident. This was going to be fun.

_**The next morning….**_

(Laurel Lance's POV)

No fun was being had at this moment, at all. She had been woken up before the crack of dawn with a bucket of water being poured over her, and then taken out into one of the large training areas on the ground to go through her sparring. What was worse that she wasn't even training with Lady Shiva. No, as she had been informed before she could even have a sip of that delicious-looking green tea that was on a table underneath a statue of Buddha, she would not get the chance to truly learn under Lady Shiva until she defeated his assistant.

"Hello, Ms. Lance. My name is Richard Dragon, and today we will start small. Show me what your previous trainer taught you. Attempt to punch me" he says, and as she throws jabs and hooks, Laurel begins to get infuriated when after every miss she is tapped directly between the middle of her eyebrows by Richard Dragon. Finally, after the longest and most frustrating 2 minutes of her life, this Richard Dragon character signals the end of the proceedings.

"I can see where your trainer's skills come from. He was a skilled professional boxer, am I correct? I ask only because every blow of yours, every strike, should have a specific rhythm. As you get better at this, you learn the value of disguising what you're doing so that no one can read your rhythm. Right now, everything you do has the rhythm of Western boxing and it's something enough people have seen enough times that we can all time what you're doing. By the time you are done with us, we will ensure that no one can pick up your rhythms at all. The work you are doing, and the reason you have come to us, is noble. The best we can do is make sure you are ready for anyone who comes to your city to do it harm" said Richard, and at that, her annoyance fades as she remembered why she was doing it.

And as she began to learn other strikes from other disciplines, she felt herself start to feel more comfortable. It wasn't so much that Ted hadn't taught her anything. At first, when she couldn't hit Richard Dragon, she felt that way. But this felt like a Ph.D. program, where what Ted had taken her through was the equivalent of going from grade school to graduating near the top of her class at the University of Washington. It was great that she had done that, to be sure, but it was in no way an indication that she was done learning. She assumed it would always be like that. And Ted could, she knew, handle teaching her these new skills. Even if he hadn't learned them himself.

_**Meanwhile, at an archery range on the other side of the monastery….**_

(Oliver Queen's POV)

He knew he was not the only archer in the world who used their skills and gifts to bring justice to the world. There were rumors of an ancient guild of them in the Himalayan mountain ranges, and from the whispers that worked their way through the circles he now traveled in, these were in no way people to be trifled with. So, as he walked into this archery range with his compound bow and a 60-arrow quiver on his back, he would freely admit to feeling a bit confident. That confidence was shattered almost immediately when someone he hadn't seen fired a faultlessly accurate arrow into a bullseye and then leapt down from a tree stand.

Glancing at this archer in front of him, he could scarcely believe it. In his hand wasn't a $3,000 compound bow lovingly crafted to his own exacting specifications, but instead a simple laminated bow from the Qing dynasty. That thing was older than his parent's parents, and yet it fired with the ease and apparent comfort of something fresh out of the case. And the arrows it fired weren't carbon-fiber like his were, but instead simply pulled off of branches and fletched with feathers. Despite that, it was difficult to imagine that he could be in the presence of a better shot or someone whose arrows moved quicker, and hit the target with more pinpoint accuracy. This was not something he would have expected to believe. And yet, here it was.

Rolling his eyes, as this was setting up for a duel between the two archers, the Green Arrow nonetheless nocked an arrow only to feel this strange sensation like his bow was gone. And then, there it was. Whoever this mysterious archer was, because he couldn't see their face or anything about the way they were built, had somehow taken his bow and quiver and removed it. Then, before an angry sentence could be uttered, this archer removed their hood. There was the next surprise. Standing in front of him was someone who looked like a teenager, and yet they moved with the skill of someone who had fired bows for 3 generations.

"Hello, Oliver Queen. My name is Jian Tao, but I am known in most circles as the Celestial Archer. It was Lady Shiva who called me and asked me to assist you to become the best archer that you could be. To do that, we will start from the beginning. This compound bow, a beautiful thing that I am sure was built for your hand alone, will not be what you are taught on. Instead, it will be left in the quarters of Lady Shiva. When you leave this monastery, it will be returned to you. The same with your arrows. We will start with classic bows and arrows, from the Chinese and Japanese tradition. When you leave this monastery, you will be able to make this shot" says Jian, before slipping on a star-covered blindfold and then drilling a perfect 325-yard shot directly into the heart of a deer at the far end of the monastery.

"Service to others, Mr. Queen, is a noble thing. You and your love share this in common, and you draw others to you who share the same desires to do good. It is a benefit. But if one wishes to be a warrior of the type you and your love wish to be, you should demand perfection from yourself. That is what this is intended to do. Are you prepared?" Jian asks, his coffee-brown eyes gazing into Oliver's very soul. Even before he could think, Oliver answered immediately.

"Yes."

_**Meanwhile, in Starling City**_….

(John Diggle's POV)

He hated having to do this. Laurel would hate that he did it, but when she came back and saw what her city turned into, she'd probably understand. That, he guessed, was her superpower. But right now, she wasn't here to protect their city and neither was Oliver. And despite his best efforts, and Felicity's for that matter, he was falling behind. There was no way, none at all, he could be everywhere at once. And the organized crime which had begun to re-root itself in Starling City knew that. The Bratva had resumed their human trafficking. The Triad and the Yakuza had started running in prostitutes and illegal gambling back into the city. Hell, there were even rumors of a chapter of the Bloods looking into Starling City for the drug trade.

The police were a combination of overwhelmed and deeply ineffectual. So, as John Diggle waited outside an apartment building that had clearly seen better days, he could see fires burning without rest in the Glades and burning cop cars at the end of the block. What had happened to his home was unforgivable, and from this day to the end of his days he would pay penance for not being skilled enough to stop this from happening. Still, though, he had to do it. He just knew it.

So, with multiple bags of ice in a shopping bag as something of a peace offering, John Diggle walked up the flights of stairs to Ted Grant's apartment, his hand on his K-Bar knife just in case anyone got the idea of trying something ridiculous. When he got to the door he knocked and heard a gruff "be there in a minute" before Ted Grant opened the door and stared at the face of John Diggle.

(Ted Grant's POV)

He figured this was going to happen. Ever since the city had gone to hell without the Green Arrow and the Black Canary to convince the criminals to walk the line, he knew whoever picked up their mantle would come to him. It made solid tactical sense. And now, to see John Diggle at his front door, he knew what was coming. Laurel, his favorite student, had told him what was going on the day before she left. She explained who she was, and that there was a chance he would be called upon to help out if things got too bad. So, he understood what Laurel would have wanted him to do. But god, after all the years he had done this in the 1970's and 1980's, his body was rebelling at the mere thought of it.

Nonetheless he took the bags of ice with a slightly raised eyebrow and welcomed John Diggle into his home.

"To what do I owe the pleasure, Mr. Diggle?" Ted said, limping over to a loveseat that had clearly seen better days.

"Let's be honest with each other, Mr. Grant. This city is falling apart without its two guardians. All any of us can do, if given the chance, is keep things from getting worse until they get back."

"But what does that have to do with me, Mr. Diggle? I'm an old man, and I just keep to myself mostly."

"Laurel told me who you were. And she told me what you used to do, and be. Your city needs you to fight for it again. Will you?"

For a moment, Ted thinks. Does he want to dive back into the breach again? Levering himself up to his feet, replacing the icepacks on his knees, he takes a moment to think. But as he does so, he can't help but glance outside at his city. The city he fought for as a boxer first, and then as a kickboxer, before becoming a vigilante. It had fallen so far that it needed more than one hand to pull it back up. Could he be that other hand? In an instant, he knew the answer.

"I have, if I think about it, about 4 handful's worth of fights left in me, Mr. Diggle. My city deserves every last one of them. How will we get started?"

_**24 months later…..**_

(Laurel Lance's POV)

She barely recognized herself when she got up on her last day in Hangzhou and prepared to drive the 5 miles to the airport. The old Laurel was thin, shy, and not as martially inclined as a hero of her caliber needed to be. And over 24 months of hard two-a-day training sessions in every form of martial art, and multiple weight-training sessions with former members of the Chinese weightlifting and track teams, the old Laurel had been buried one kata and one rep at a time. So, as she got up, she did something she vowed she'd never do. She looked in the mirror. Not out of fear from what she would see, but pride in how hard she had worked to completely rebuild herself. Because she knew what the new Laurel had become.

The new Laurel was confident, in both herself and the love she shared with Oliver Queen. Many nights, after training and meals at the training table, they would just talk. About life, and love, and what they wanted. Laurel had demanded to be treated as a woman, to be touched and caressed and kissed instead of admired.

The new Laurel was a tremendous fighter. 14 months in, she had learned everything Richard Dragon had taught her and then spent the last 10 months training with Lady Shiva until she could switch styles based entirely on the way her opponent would be standing. She would always appreciate what Ted Grant had done for her, but she felt like a master now in a way she doubted she could have if she had stayed with him.

And finally, the new Laurel was sure no one would look at her and see the sexless older sister anymore. She wasn't about to run around showing off her charms willy-nilly like her baby sister did, but she knew she looked good now and she noticed people looking. She was stronger, and leaner, without looking like a bodybuilder or a dehydrated fitness model.

Grabbing her gym bag and heading towards the door she looked back at her old room. While many nights had been spent there dealing with full-body cramps and the pain of knowing why she was here, this was always the place she'd think of as where her rebirth happened.

Now, to return back home and finally put the wrong things right. Where was Ollie?

(Oliver Queen's POV)

While Laurel had done fight training for 24 months, Oliver had his archery form broken down and rebuilt. Sure he had trained with Lady Shiva to be able to beat anyone who tried to test him in hand-to-hand combat, and felt comfortable knowing that he had mastered enough forms of martial arts to not be useless should his bow be taken from him. But in his soul, in the only part of him he **WANTED** to keep from Lian Yu, he would always be an archer. And in that spirit, Jian Tao, his teacher who called himself the Celestial Archer, had been invaluable.

He had broken him down and made him fire laminated Chinese and Japanese bows until he could do so blindfolded, getting used to firing traditional longbows so that he could accurately aim and not just require on the compound bow to do the work he was not yet skilled at doing. With Jian Tao's careful teaching, he had learned how to draw and fire arrows as a quick-draw master during the Old West might have with a revolver. Before too long, he had his compound bow and 60-arrow quiver returned to him as Jian Tao told him "there is nothing more you have left to learn".

Now, with them both ready, Oliver Jonas Queen began to hatch a plan. He would save his city, with his love by his side, and when the time was right, he would ask her to bind his life to his.

Starling City, here they come.

_**The next morning at Starling City International Airport….**_

(Laurel Lance's POV)

This was beyond horrible. Apocalypse was an insult to whatever this was. Starling City was on fire, and you could see it from the private jet they flew back into town on. And it only got worse once they landed.

The airport was populated by a skeleton crew of exhausted TSA agents who looked like they hadn't slept in weeks, and were seeing threats that weren't there. They had, by mutual accord, agreed to not have any contact with Starling City. At the time, she thought their reasoning sound. If they knew what was going on, they would have been tempted to stay behind and never get better or learn anything. Instead, they had to trust that the city's law enforcement agencies, and whatever vigilantes existed in their stead could fill the void.

Laurel saw now just how foolish that was. Because, and she cursed herself for not remembering this, the reason they came together to save the city was that no one else was even contemplating the possibility of doing the job the way it needed to be done. And so, she now realized, things had been done wrong. But no good would come from self-flagellation.

And so, as they walked through the airport, they scanned their surroundings. None of the stores were open, and a bare minimum of the food courts. Whatever was happening here, the airport had been claimed first. Groaning to themselves about the damn shame of it all, Oliver and Laurel placed themselves in fight mode. If they were going to be placed in a position to have to fight their way from baggage claim to their car, they would be ready.

By the time they got to their car, where an exhausted and drawn-looking John Diggle waited for them eating a bacon cheeseburger seemingly out of a desire to keep himself from falling over where he stood, they had pieced together the whole sordid story. Turns out, when Oliver and Laurel left, the power vacuum was not filled the way it ought to have been. The police didn't step up, and John Diggle and Ted Grant could only do but so much. So here they were, with a city burning and no one to come to its aid but them.

Time to get started.

(Oliver Queen's POV)

What had he done? Oh god, what had he allowed to happen? He knew, intellectually, it was a good idea. Lord knows, during those first few months, he had enough nightmares of this exact thing. But now, as he watched his home be wrecked, he realized the nightmares couldn't do this thing justice. His city, the place he had promised his father that he would save, was burning largely because of decisions he had made. This wasn't something he ever hoped for, but how much better would it have been if he had died with arrows in him, or bullets, because he wasn't as ready to fight as he needed to be?

Once that thought hit his mind, the guilt faded. He could fix this. He knew that. It might take years, but it could be done. And now that it was done, he glanced off in the distance and started to plan. If he was going to bring his city back from the brink, he couldn't do it with blind recklessness. He had to plan.

And then in a corner of the city that had not yet been claimed, an oasis if he was thinking of it, he saw a plume of smoke. Normally, that wouldn't be too weird. But while all the other smoke throughout Starling City was black, this particular plume was purple. And that made him remember something.

While Laurel's time not spent training, either with weights or in fighting, was in meditation to find inner confidence, Oliver used his time in the service of becoming a better tactical thinker. He read about every ancient order he could get his hands on, and their rites just in case he would have to come across them. The purple smoke, then, reminded him of the League of Assassins and it dawned on him. Everything that Tommy had done, and what Laurel told him Sara had done, was their tactics to a T. It was time, he supposed, to put the League on notice by beating two of their former students.

_**A few hours later at an abandoned warehouse in the Glades…**_

(Oliver Queen's POV)

And so here they were, at the source of the smoke. Laurel to his left, her new physique and costume covered up in a long trenchcoat. Oliver had his compound bow and 60-arrow quiver, and was beginning to bristle at being kept waiting.

And then, leaping through a 1st-floor window, there they were. Tommy Merlyn, holding a recurve bow that Oliver knew was the classic model the League used, and Sara Lance.

"Rules?" Ollie said, hatred and disappointment leaving his voice as he wishes he didn't have to do this but understanding Tommy had long ago made the decision for him.

"No pistols. No poisons" Tommy said, hatred and jealousy dipping off of him even as he drew his bow. Just from the way he was standing, Oliver could tell Tommy wasn't really going to fire. This was a threat play, and while the Oliver who thought Tommy was his friend might not have seen the bluff, the Oliver Queen standing in front of him now knew what it was. So Oliver stood up tall and straight as a tree, looming over his friend like a grown-ass man looking down at a disobedient child.

"You wanted this. You wanted to take this to this place. So whatever happens here, wherever this ends up, is on your head Tommy. Not mine. This is your responsibility. It's time to pay for your choices."

(Laurel Lance's POV)

As Sara watched the confrontation between Tommy and Oliver with a dark lust in her eyes, Laurel simply dropped her trenchcoat and watched with a smile as Tommy's jaw dropped and Sara's eyes narrowed. Gone was the thin good girl with no self-confidence. Instead, the woman in front of Sara Marie Lance was taller, curvier almost to the point of deeply unfamiliar, and carried herself like a queen. As much as one could be a queen in a black leather jacket, a black tank top that was fighting a losing battle against her newly developed chest, purple leather pants with fishnet cutouts that made her thickly muscled legs pop, and custom-made weightlifting shoes, Laurel Lance did that.

"This is boring, Sara. Having people look at me for my body, not caring to know the person behind the way I look, is deeply frustrating. But look at the love of your life now, Sara. The man you said was a real man. He can't keep his eyes off of me. My love, the man I want to bind my life to, loved me for the person I want to be before I became THIS. Yours lusts after you, but does he care for you?" Laurel asked, even as she got into a classic fighting stance, bouncing back and forth on the balls of her feet.

And with that one question, the battle was joined. Tommy and Sara were on the back foot quickly, stunned as they were by the way their old friends moved. But eventually, they gathered themselves and were able to counter and block on a level that indicated this was a serious fight. Even then, though, it rather quickly became clear that their opponents were not the same children they had fought before. These were adults now, trained and skilled masters.

Tommy discovered any attempt to fire his bow was blocked and countered with devastating ridge-hand strikes and perfectly chambered kicks to the ribs and stomach, and before too long, Tommy was bruised and moving slowly. Meanwhile, Sara found that Laurel was moving entirely too quickly, and hitting with entirely too much power, to do anything but just stand there and take the shots.

Glancing at each other, Laurel and Oliver decide to end this quickly. Oliver draws his bow faster than Tommy can comprehend and quickly fires a tranquilizer arrow followed by a net arrow. Meanwhile, Laurel lands a butterfly kick and then a quartet of hurricane kicks on Sara to drop her to the ground.

Finally, mercifully, the whole thing is over and done. Their battle with their former friends over, it is now time to begin a whole different battle.

As Laurel finished calling the police, and glancing on the rooftop to figure out where Ollie could fire a grappling arrow, she turned around and saw him on one knee.

"Dinah Laurel Lance, we have suffered together, and grown together. Will you make my dreams come true, and be my wife?"

At that moment, Laurel said yes. From where she started, to where she is now, everything was just fine.


End file.
